“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
If you are in your mid 40s you are not going to become great at something new to you (painting, quantum physics, chess, programming, etc etc). It is nice to dream of that, but it does not happen.
You might become decent and contribute to society in your new skill but that's different.
Who are those people who have made a single great contribution at an advanced age (let's say past 50)?
The few that I can think of (like that obscure mathematician who didn't get tenure and did his research alone) labored in their calling starting in their 20s at the latest.
The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age(Colonel Sanders etc)
>The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age
Business success and greatly contributing to the society in the way that most people dream of aren't mutually exclusive. You might not be the kind of person with a PhD who made a scientific breakthrough and finally developed a great self-driving car, but if you created a business that managed to achieve that same thing, I see no reason why it wouldn't count.
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
If you are in your mid 40s you are not going to become great at something new to you (painting, quantum physics, chess, programming, etc etc). It is nice to dream of that, but it does not happen.
You might become decent and contribute to society in your new skill but that's different.
Who are those people who have made a single great contribution at an advanced age (let's say past 50)?
The few that I can think of (like that obscure mathematician who didn't get tenure and did his research alone) labored in their calling starting in their 20s at the latest.
The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age(Colonel Sanders etc)